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Poisoning the Minds of America's Schoolchildren

Teaching kids to hate their country's traditions and institutions.

For the past 30 years, a Philadelphia-based organization called Need in Deed (NID) has been training elementary and middle-school teachers “to use the classroom to prepare young people for civic responsibility and service to others.” And how, exactly, does NID do this? By training its teachers to engage students in long-term “service projects” whose objective is to: (a) inculcate youngsters with the notion that America is an oppressive wasteland where nonwhite minorities, women, homosexuals, the poor, and even the natural environment are routinely exploited and abused; and (b) turn children into budding political activists and community organizers who seek to fundamentally transform that deeply flawed society.

For example, in one NID project at Grover Washington Jr. Middle School in Philadelphia, eighth-grade students explored “some of the discriminatory housing forces – practices like redlining, steering, predatory lending and ethnic intimidation – that have influenced the[ir] city’s racial and economic segregation” over the years. As part of their instruction, these students watched an ABC Nightline segment titled “Race in America,” which examined the case of a black family that had fearfully fled their new home in a mostly white section of Philadelphia after neighbors harassed them with racial epithets and threatening letters. After watching the video, the students were asked to express, in writing, their outrage over how the black family had been mistreated.

As part of that same NID project, Princeton sociologist Doug Massey, author of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of an Underclass – a book claiming that black urban poverty is largely a result of massive discrimination in U.S. cities – addressed the students personally. In a subsequent lesson, the youngsters watched a documentary titled Race: The Power of an Illusion, which, in the words of its producer, “reveals how our social institutions 'make' race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.”

Another NID project – designed to introduce young people to purportedly heroic women who have battled the forces of “racism, homophobia, [and] sexism” – required the pupils to read the Kate Schatz book Rad American Women A-Z. The women who are profiled and lionized in Schatz's book are almost all leftists, and in some cases Marxists or political revolutionaries. Among them:

In 2011, an NID-affiliated teacher in West Philadelphia led her class in a project focusing on the correlation between gun violence and the Second Amendment right to bear arms. The lessons and activities associated with this project were heavily weighted against gun-ownership rights, and in favor of gun control. Most notably, the project solicited a considerable amount of input from Physicians for Social Responsibility, an organization that has worked to shut down gun manufacturing businesses, and to make gun manufacturers legally liable for crimes committed with the weapons they produce.

Another NID-affiliated teacher led his students in a project examining the problem of wrongful convictions in criminal court, and promoting the notion that the American criminal-justice system is replete with race-based discrimination and inequity. As part of this project, the students met with a representative from Pennsylvania’s Innocence Project, whose mission – which is likewise founded on the premise of a racist justice system – is to “free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated.”

Yet another leading concern of NID is the issue of immigration policy. In one third-grade class earlier this year, an NID teacher led her students in a project examining “the physiological and psychological effects of stress” associated with “the current political climate around immigrants and immigration.” “Half of my students,” the teacher said, “were kept home from school to observe 'A Day Without Immigrants'” – a reference to a May 1, 2017 action in which enormous numbers of Latino immigrants, activists, and workers took the day off from their jobs and marched in the streets of dozens of American cities, in what organizers characterized as a response to President Donald Trump's supposedly anti-immigration agendas.

At present, NID consists of approximately 140 member teachers in 60 schools throughout the city of Philadelphia. It is through the efforts of such individuals and such organizations, that an entire generation of young people is being indoctrinated in the corrosive, anti-American, anti-capitalist mindset of the hard Left.